A high-ranking CIA official warned Condoleezza Rice in September 2002
that allegations about Iraq seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger were
untrue and that she, as national security adviser, should stop
President George W. Bush from citing the claim in making his case
against Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to new evidence released by
a House committee.

Nevertheless, the false Niger story showed up in Bush’s State of the
Union Address on Jan 28, 2003, and Rice later joined other White House
officials in blaming the CIA for failing to alert them about the
dubious intelligence.

However, Rep. Henry Waxman, House Oversight Committee chairman, said in
a Dec. 18 memo to other panel members that statements by Rice and
former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales were contradicted by
testimony and other evidence collected during the panel’s long
investigation of the Niger mystery.

“For more than five years, I have been seeking answers to basic
questions about why the President made a false assertion about such a
fundamental matter,” the California Democrat said.

“As the President's national security adviser at the time, Condoleezza
Rice asserted publicly that she knew nothing about any doubts the CIA
had raised about this claim prior to the 2003 State of the Union
address,” Waxman wrote, noting that Gonzales had “asserted to the
Senate - on her behalf - that the CIA approved the use of the claim in
several presidential speeches.

“The [House Oversight] Committee has obtained evidence that just the
opposite is true. This evidence would appear to raise serious questions
about the veracity of the assertions that Mr. Gonzales made to Congress
on behalf of Dr. Rice about a key part of the President's case for
going to war in Iraq.”

CIA Testimony

The House Oversight Committee obtained testimony from Jami Miscik, who
was the CIA’s Deputy Director of Intelligence in 2002. Miscik stated
that she intervened with Rice after some of Rice’s aides on the
National Security Council staff resisted CIA demands that they remove
the Niger uranium claim from a presidential speech.

"Ms. Miscik stated that she spoke with Dr. Rice directly over the
telephone on Sept. 24, 2002,” Waxman wrote in his memo. “Ms. Miscik …
was asked to explain directly to Dr. Rice ‘the reasons why we didn't
think this was credible.’ Ms. Miscik stated, ‘[i]t was clear that we
had problems or we at the most fundamental level wouldn't have been
having the phone call at all.’"

House investigators also learned from John Gibson, a chief speechwriter
at the NSC, that there was an attempt to insert the Niger uranium claim
in an earlier Bush speech at the request of chief White House
speechwriter Michael Gerson and Robert Joseph, a senior aide to Rice.

However, Gibson said the CIA rejected the uranium claim as “not
sufficiently reliable to include it in the speech.” Gibson added that
“the CIA was not willing to clear that language” and “at the end of the
day they did not clear it.”

The CIA fought to keep the Niger allegations out of another
presidential speech on Iraq, scheduled for October 2002 in Cincinnati,
according to testimony from then-CIA Director George Tenet, who said he
spoke personally with Stephen Hadley, Rice’s deputy.

"In his deposition, Mr. Tenet provided new details about the explicit
nature of these warnings," Waxman wrote, adding that Tenet said he was
approached by CIA subordinates who urged him to intervene because they
were encountering resistance from the NSC staff about striking the
dubious information from the speech.

“Staff came down to say there was specific language that they wanted
out and, essentially, I called Mr. Hadley up,” Tenet said. “It was a
very short conversation. And I said Steve, take it out. We don't want
the President to be a fact witness on this issue.”

Mr. Tenet added, "The facts, I told him, were too much in doubt. … We
sent two memos to Mr. Hadley saying, this is why you don't let the
President say this in Cincinnati."

Claim Reappears

Though the Niger claim was removed from the speeches in 2002, Rice
penned an op-ed on Jan. 23, 2003, claiming Iraq was actively trying "to
get uranium from abroad."

Then, five days later, the allegation ended up in the President’s 2003
State of the Union Address when Bush said, "The British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa," what became known as “The Sixteen Words.”

Bush’s line about Iraq’s nuclear ambitions helped the President seal
the case for war with Congress and the American public. But it had
other unexpected consequences.

After Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003, former U.S. Ambassador
Joseph Wilson began revealing that he had undertaken a fact-finding
mission for the CIA to Niger in February 2002 and returned with the
strong belief that the uranium-buying allegation was bogus, a
conclusion shared by other U.S. officials who had examined the evidence.

Wilson went public with his account on July 6, 2003, with an op-ed in
the New York Times, accusing the Bush administration of “twisting” the
intelligence to justify the war.

Five days later, Rice blamed the CIA for failing to vet the Niger
claims, and Tenet accepted responsibility, which many people
interpreted as Tenet falling on his sword to protect the President

Though Wilson’s article forced the White House to back track, it also
touched off a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Wilson, a drive
that led Bush administration officials to disclose to selected
reporters that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA officer.

When right-wing columnist Robert Novak published that fact on July 14,
2003, Mrs. Wilson’s career as a covert CIA officer was effectively over.

Leak Investigation

The CIA then demanded a leak investigation, which eventually ended with
the 2007 conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s
chief of staff, for perjury and obstruction of justice. Bush later
commuted Libby’s sentence to spare him any jail time.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the Niger case in
2004, then-White House counsel Gonzales told the panel – on behalf of
Rice – that the CIA “orally cleared” the uranium claim “for use by the
President” in his speeches.

However, Waxman continued his panel’s investigation on a separate
track. He subpoenaed Rice last year seeking to compel her testimony
about whether she knew in advance that the Niger intelligence was
unreliable. Rice refused to comply with the subpoena.

In his memo, Waxman disclosed the new evidence that suggests that
Gonzales and Rice may have lied about the CIA’s role in the Niger case.

“Unfortunately, Dr. Rice resisted efforts by the Committee to obtain
her testimony about these matters,” Waxman wrote. “Thus, I am not able
to report to you how she would explain the seeming contradictions
between her statements and those of Mr. Gonzales on her behalf and the
statements made to the Committee by senior CIA and NSC officials.”

Waxman wrote his Dec. 18 memo in the context of ending his tenure as
Oversight Committee chairman. In January, he will become chairman of
the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Other key figures in the case also have moved on to other jobs and
assignments. Rice is now Secretary of State. Hadley replaced her as
national security adviser.

Gonzales rose to be Attorney General before resigning in the midst of a
scandal over politicizing the Justice Department. Tenet also resigned
amid criticism of intelligence failures at the CIA. Gerson is now a
columnist for the Washington Post.